Posted
by
timothyon Thursday October 01, 2009 @01:14PM
from the sooner-is-better dept.

Globally Mobile writes "The Register has this article concerning GE's announcement that it has been developing a 1 terabyte DVD-size disk that can be read by a modified Blu-ray player. Peter Lorraine, GE's lab manager, talking at an Emerging Tech conference last week, said that license announcements could be expected soon. He also mentioned the notion of disks having the capacity of 100 Blu-ray disks, implying a 2.5TB or even 5TB capacity, gained by increasing the number of layers used for recording. The discs will be used for high-end commercial niches initially and then migrate to consumer markets in 2012-2015. Also here is a video of the technology explained. Wish we could see this sooner! Reminds me of the technology that Bowie's character came up with in The Man Who Fell to Earth."

I see little reason to "upgrade" during this generation too. For one, everything is very expensive for small gains, in order to really "enjoy" Blu-Ray you have to buy an -expensive- player, for me I'd have to buy an expensive HD TV, and the disks themselves are expensive. Yeah, if you are buying a new TV and everything it makes little sense not to upgrade, but if you are like just about everyone else who has everything working why pay $$$ and upgrade? Sure, HD has a better picture quality, but not $1000+ worth of it, plus, I can rent DVD movies for $1 a night, I can't rent Blu-Ray that cheaply. I didn't get any current gen game consoles save for the Wii until recently because at the start they all sucked and the Wii was the only one that started with a decent price. The 360 was too unreliable in the first few motherboard revisions (RRoD) and the PS3 until about a month or two ago was -far- too expensive. Vista was inferior to XP and cost extra so I didn't upgrade my XP box to Vista. And to be perfectly honest, I don't need a lot of data backed up, my music is redundantly backed up on various MP3 players over the years and audio CDs, I don't have a huge picture collection so most pictures are still on my 4 gig SD card, and anything else needed to be backed up fits nicely on a standard DVD. I don't need to spend $2 on Blu-Ray disks and more for a drive when I only need a few gigs of things backed up.

Upgrading to the Bluray version of Star Trek eliminated the annoying artifacts present on the DVD version. That's an improvement that's visible even on a standard definition set.

Also there's nothing to skip in the case of Bluray. 1920x1080 progressive is the highest standard available, and will be for several decades (NTSC lasted almost 70 years and ATSC will probably last several decades too).

I agree about the gaming consoles. I'm still having fun with my PS1/PS2 and N64/Gamecube library. Why upgrade?

Depends on how many movies you watch though. Myself I only watch a movie at most once a week on Friday night if I don't have something more productive to do. So its still an extra $1 per Blu-Ray disk if we assume that I watch 3 movies or so in a month. For someone who constantly watches movies, Netflix would be a better deal though.

trust me, you're not missing anything. Seems nothing has changed, they just take the same old stuff and slap a new coat of paint on it. Guess Hollywood isn't the only ones who have run out of new ideas.

Try around US $3 (ex. tax) upwards. Admittedly, that's for single-layer 25GB write-once BD-R, and the very cheapest, generic original obscure brand ones at that. Nowhere near as cheap per GB as DVD-R, but still nowhere near $25.

I posted a similar comment about a year ago. Optical media should be a great backup medium, but because they take so long to ramp up production and push the cost of the media down, it is useless before anyone can afford it. Blu-ray media at 50 GB per disc is already useless and it still isn't even close to price parity with hard drives. To fully back up a 500 GB hard drive (the industry average size now) takes 10 discs to back up once. At 30 minutes per disc, this is five hours of continuous burning, during which time you have to have someone swapping out discs every half hour. For a terabyte HD, you're more than an entire work day. You should be doing a full backup at least every month and incremental backups weekly. Do the math, and you're spending the better part of a week every month just doing backups. The average hard drive needs to be able to be backed up on a single disc or you've already failed. Blu-ray has already failed.

As a result, recordable optical media is basically worthless except for people burning content to give to other people, which is a tiny fraction of its potential user base. If they would ramp production way up and flood the market with cheap media immediately even before the recorders are available in quantities, people would flock to them in droves. It's counterintuitive, but the only way any optical format will ever be particularly useful to the general consumer is if the industry decides to make it a loss leader for about a year. By the end of that year, you'll have so much adoption that it won't be losing money anymore, and it will be in the hands of consumers early enough to be broadly useful.

"Can someone find the old slashdot article about petabyte holographic storage? I don't remember how far back it was, but talking about hundreds + layer holographic storage basically."
Every year there's another "hundreds of layers of storage" article, and we're still sitting here with dual layer DVDs. By the time we see terabyte discs we'll probably all have petabyte hard drives. I remember them talking about blu ray in the 90s, with the prototype arriving in 2000. [wikipedia.org] Back when we had 6gb drives the idea of 50gb discs was amazing, but they dragged their feet so bad creating a standard that by the time it reached market we all moved on to terabyte hard drives. Blu ray burners are still too damn expensive [newegg.com], costing five times ($160 vs $30) more than a DVD burner costs. And once you have one then what? Pay $3 to $7 for each BD-R disc? [newegg.com] No thanks, even at $3 for 25gb that's $120 per terabyte, 50% more than a 1 terabyte hard drive [newegg.com].
So forgive me if I don't get all excited every time they announce a new high capacity disc format because they haven't fixed the one they have out now.

Makes you stop and think when the cost of a disk + disk drive is lower than just a disc... At what point do they just scrap the whole optical media idea altogether and just package removable magnetic hard drive disk's.

that by now, DVD-DL would come down in price. Regular DVD-Rs, I can find them for $0.30 or less each but DVD-DLs are still $1.60 each. With Blue-ray and all this advancing technology, the industry is still strangling the consumer for DVD-DLs.

Seriously though, you can get verbatim DVD-DL for $1 or less per disc if you buy spindles, just look more carefully. Note that Verbatim is almost the only brand worth buying if you expect to be able to read the discs for any length of time. Or at least it was a few months back when I did my last spate of research and disc buying. I'll buy whatever for day use; I buy Memorex for medium-term use and Verbatim for storage and long-term use. YMMV

holographic data storage is fractal in nature, meaning if you make a hologram of a car and then snap it in half you won't end up with 2 holograms of half a car each, you'll end up with 2 holograms of a full with half the resolution as the original.
Methinks this would be good for data-redundancy in other applications as well

If it is being used for audio/video applications, scratches would be no more damaging on this super HD disc (10,080p!) than a regular Blu Ray or DVD. If you are using it for data storage... I have bad news for you...

"Enough error correcting data would be distributed all around the disc to recover from localized scratches." Yes, but this isn't random-access memory. Data is easiest to read if it's stored in a linear fashion. And if you're worried about circular scratches too, you'd have to put the error-correcting data even farther away.

How many MB will be wiped out by a pathetically small scratch on the disk? Remember the promises made of audio CD's?

You're assuming that in order to fit more data on the disc, they've just shrunk CD technology. That's not the case. Holographically stored data are spatially distributed. I'm not sure exactly how they handle damage, but I think a "pathetically small scratch" would have a pathetically small effect on the replay.

With that much space they could have software that automagically stores some parity bits somewhere else. Or write the data twice. If you are storing 100 GB (a shit ton) you could write it on the disc about 10 times.

Or have a backup. i'd use these disks as a backup, rather than primary storage.

8' thick slab of granite, with letters laser cut through. This is then sealed in the middle of 30' of non-reactive UV resistant clear polymer. This cube is then set on top of a mountain on the south pole of the moon, aligned so that the sun only strikes it once every 240 earth days, shining through and then having flaming letters 300' high show up on the shadowed wall of crater Faustinni.

Storage is always in bytes. Bits would be transmission rate (because it correlates to frequency)

In information theory, storage is also considered a (noisy) communication channel. You still have the same problem of representing bits in terms of something analog, with a suitable coding to minimize errors.

Storage is often given in bits. For example, the size of every one of the NAND Flash ICs listed in Micron's online part catalog [micron.com] is given in gigabits.

The GP could have checked the article before commenting, but it is perfectly reasonable to wonder whether the submitter intended "1Tb" to be one terabit (exactly 125 * 10^9 bytes), as written, or one terabyte (about 1.0737 * 10^9 bytes, or exactly 2^30 bytes).

Storage is measured in bytes, communication channels in bits. The difference between 1TB and 1TiB is only about 9%. I'm guessing most people could recover that by clearing out temporary files and duplicates.

(Movie was a moderately faithful adaptation, as such things go-- unlike some SF movies, where little is taken from the book other than the name, and--in the case of Bladerunner--not even that.)

This is something I often lament, but Blade Runner is one of the few examples where the departure from the novel was a very, very good thing. Don't get me wrong, I am a huge fan of PKD, but Ridley Scott's adaptation worked much better for the screen than a faithful adaptation would have. Dick's style, unfortunately, does not transfer well to the screen (the notable exception being Richard Linklater's fantastic adaptation of A Scanner Darkly).

So, what is it? 1 Tb (terabit) or 1 TB (terabyte). If you are going to fuck up your abbreviations, at least be consistent about it instead of using Tb in the title and TB in the text.

Actually I think it's the editor that needs to be hit upside the head with a terrabat (no, that's not a typo, that's supposed to be a bat made out from the ground - i.e. granite), as he probably tried to "prettify" the title.

With the plummeting costs of magnetic storage, what is the point of this? I mean, optical storage is practical when you are talking about a few GB, but for multiple TB? I mean, how long would it take to burn one of those suckers, five, maybe six months? Why not just buy a cheap eSATA or USB external drive and stick it in a closet somewhere -- it's not much more expensive, lasts longer, and saves you a ton of productivity.

The entertainment industry could use then to create 1 disk sets.All Disney Films on one disk, for example.

Anyone where stamp data is needed for this size.I can see a solution where you ahve an HD attached to your computer with a special addition BUS designed to push data to these devices at a high rate. Since it's direct you remove a lot of over head,. It would be expensive, but for companies dealing in petabytes of data it would probably be worth while.

Much bigger problem is the optical mechinery of these discs, those might be readable after 10 years, but the drives with ton of moving parts might not even last that long, at that time we would have solid state discs much more capable, anything mechanical is just a dead-end research here. More like somebody tricked GE capital investors to buy this expensive "holography" technology, I can't see anything really groundbreaking stemming from this.

Why not just buy a cheap eSATA or USB external drive and stick it in a closet somewhere -- it's not much more expensive, lasts longer, and saves you a ton of productivity.

GE expects a 1TB disk will be $100 5 years from now. That's more than a 1TB drive costs now, by then it will be 5 times as much. So people wouldn't use these disks to save money. The only whys I can think of are that it is smaller, and maybe lasts longer. Lasting longer is tough to tell, but historically optical disks have had a longer shelf-life than magnetic media when it has adequate error correction and no DRM.

I see what you are saying. But at least in theory, optical media such as CD/DVD, etc *should be* much cheaper than anything like a disk drive by virtue of the material components used alone. A DVD is largely plastic, whereas a disk has electronics and finely tuned mechanics and is much more complex; the media AND the drive for that media are all-in-one whereas with DVD, you have one drive for any number of media.

I mean, how long would it take to burn one of those suckers, five, maybe six months?

A 24x DVD writer commits 32MB/s. At that speed, it would take just over nine hours to write one terabyte.

However, keep in mind that the biggest limitation to write speed in optical media comes from the maximum rotation
speed possible (discs tend to explode above 10k RPM) combined with the areal density. The former we can't get around
without switching to something more durable than cheap polycarbonate sandwiches; the

If you increase the storage density, there will be more bytes per track, which will increase the data transfer speed. However, there will also be more tracks on the disk, and as you can't increase the number of tracks read per minute, it will take longer to read or fill a higher capacity disk.

I would love to be able to burn backups to non-magnetic disk, and not have to use 40 of them to back up 1TB or more of data. I would hope that one of the early niches they'll look into will be backups and storage needs.

Wasn't there a company promising this exact same technology about ten years ago? I've found articles from 2005 talking about a holographic disc from InPhase, and I seem to recall hearing about another company working on something similar even earlier than that, though I can't recall the name of it...what I do recall is hearing something along the lines of the company shutting down several years ago.

Everything I'd heard about holography and one of the most appealing and promising things about it was that it would not require, or at least minimize, moving parts. Why are they now recreating holographic media as Yet Another Spinning Disc device with parts that wear out quickly, go out of alignment, and put the media at risk of damage? A digital storage medium without moving parts could easily provide devices with unprecedented longevity.

I get the connection to make a Blu-Ray backward-compatible medium, but why lock ourselves in to a bad idea (spinning platters) for a medium that's had lackluster adoption*?

* - which I contend is almost entirely the fault of the iron grip the entertainment distribution industry has tried to impose on the digital storage industry With Great Fail.

Mass produced CDs and DVDs aren't "burned", they are pressed from masters so that the embedded metal foil layer has the correct pattern on it. This allows for very, very high speed production. Is it possible to do the same thing for these holographic discs? If not, this could be a nice backup media but won't replace DVD or Blu-ray.

I think a big challenge to these holographic schemes is that LTO keeps ramping up, and thus an archive market for non-tape solutions never opens up. LTO-4 now holds 800 GB, and when LTO-5 comes out it wil be 1.6 TB.

I tried to argue that you could fit whole seasons of some TV shows on one Blu-Ray disk, but the argument came back "if it ain't in HD, I'm not buying a Blu-Ray disk." So these new disks could hold entire runs of some series, but it probably won't be sold as such. Pity.

Or I could hold an entire season in HD of a TV series on a single 1 TB magnetic hard drive (for less money).